Category Archives: Terrorism

What is the long-term perspective of present-day, often suicidal terrorism?

It’s that there isn’t much to fear about, because terrorism is peculiarly idiotic and bound to destroy itself (unless we do anything egregiously wrong)

For the law of diminishing returns, either attacks get bigger and bigger, or the targeted population will choose habituation rather than increased fear. It’s like opening the proverbial bonfire with the stakes too high, and having to destroy one’s forest simply to keep up

With millions of potential victims, some of them will surely come up one day with novel solutions to prevent the killings, making further attacks quite hard to organize: think the Israeli wall, think the changed tactics of the US Navy after the first round of Japanese Kamikaze pilots

Just like then, “the best and the brightest” in the terror organization are bound to blow themselves up. They can be substituted, but it does take around two decades to make another terrorist. In the meanwhile, ranks will be increasingly more replete of coward weasels that couldn’t stomach the suicide they themselves require of others

For the same reason, terrorists will become stupider and stupider, lone losers who will discredit the terror organization by their very existence

Those people want to die whilst the rest of the world wants to live. Guess who’ll be sticking around the longest? On average, both aspirations are bound to be fulfilled.

In the fight against relatively well-organized societies, the only way to victoryfor the terrorists is to get hold of weapons of mass destruction – otherwise the chances of any one person becoming a victim will remain vanishingly small. And what will happen of WMDs in the hands of a suicidal terror organization populated by coward weasels and lone losers? Boom…and there go the terrorists

And yet that is a valid point mostly if not only from a propaganda point-of-view. There comes a point when one has to stand and state that the same awful behavior is no indication of there necessarily being anything intrinsically wrong with Islam, Communism, Roman Catholicism or Anthropogenic Climate Change.

The actual flaws, if there are any, must be discovered and argued for what they are. A simple labelling “Some of their supporters are up to no good” cannot demonstrate if Milwall is or isn’t a good team. Likewise the millions killed by Tamerlane have zero logical relationship with the standard of behavior of the average Muslim citizen. And the fact that France and Germany started a war 99 years ago that led to more than 100 million dead, does not necessarily mean there is something very wrong with France and Germany.

There could be, but we cannot know before finding a proper argument above and beyond the behavioral one.

The above is an introduction to a series of comments I have made in another blog, where the diffuse anti-Islam propaganda has unfortunately found some new victims. I’m posting most of the comments unedited or slightly so.

“The Metropolitan Police confirmed Mr Green was arrested by members of its counter-terrorism command, thought to be Special Branch officers, at his home in Kent and searches were conducted at his homes in London and Kent and at two offices in Kent and London. It said the investigation was not terrorism related but did fall within the counter-terror unit’s remit and thatit was made without the knowledge or approval of ministers.”

If you don’t hear from Yours Truly for a while, please send cake with obligatory hand-file to Belmarsh Prison, Thamesmead, London (UK)

Just in case there was any doubt about it…given the history of al-Qaeda-inspired activities around the world, and leaving aside 9/11, it is obvious with the Marriott’s bomb of yesterday in Islamabad that that Osama bin Laden and all the people inspired by him have achieved one and only one goal.

Whatever one could think of her and her many defects, there will undeniably be a time-before and a time-after the death of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

And that should be enough to establish that she wasn’t just “the daughter of <somebody>”.

Even her assassination has been a very special event. Gunshots followed by a bomb? Virtually unheard of. Al Qaeda it ain’t! As things stand now, it’s more likely that the bomb has been the tool used to “cancel the fingerprints” of whoever ordered the shooting.

Sadly, that means the Pakistani Government is the most likely culprit.

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One definitely wonders what has gone so wrong in the past 60 years, to make the inhabitants of the Land of the Pure so keen to kill each other.

“The number is magic“, our informant explained. “Apart from the Douglas Adams connection, it is the number of seconds the Prime Minister dedicated to the well-being of the electors during the whole of last month. It is the number of privacy-data-containing disks actually lost by HMRC. It is the number of sleaze scandals left to discover in the life of this Government“.

In unrelated news: new analysis have confirmed that the average IQ of a Labour Government Minister is in the region of 42.

Also, the Tories have stated their “terror limit” is 28, whilst the LibDems are still debating, all meeting in the back of the usual cab.